This startup provides an online gathering place where users meet new people based around shared interests. Every day, it connects users to someone they haven’t met before based on location, history, interests, and intent — what the service calls “pools.”

Upon signing up, you join pools based around your background, passions, and the type of people you would like to meet. The technology then makes relevant matches and the rest is up to you.

“There are numerous reports showing how social networks are making the world less social,” said founder and CEO Alex Capecelatro in a statement. “As the Internet has evolved, we’ve seen more access to data, more access to curated content, and more access to the people we know, but very little in regard to connecting new social spheres. Frustrated with how difficult it is to meet new people, and how the Internet has been a barrier instead of a gateway, we set out to create a platform that gets us offline.”

The goal is to help people interact in the physical world. At The Pool makes introductions that can go beyond the first stage. The web is replete with dating sites that provide a similar service, but those are mostly patronized by people looking for a romantic connection. At The Pool is more focused on friendship and peers, so you no longer have to go alone to those obscure indie film screenings or have someone to play badminton with.

This invite-only “exclusive community of extraordinary people” launched in July and has expanded its presence into more than 50 countries. Today, At The Pool is announcing product updates and a $1 million round of funding from Clearstone Venture Partners and a syndicate of L.A. angel invetors. The homepage was redesigned to switch from a focus on daily matches to a news feed format where relevant content and updates are posted.

The team also enhanced the “activities” feature so users can post things they want to do nearby and notify people who may be interested. This was in response to a large number of requests from members that wanted to organize events on the fly.

Since launching, the levels of user engagement have been high. The company claims that members send an average of 15 messages in their first 60 days and 20 to 30 percent of members return almost daily. The gender division is split fairly evenly. As for age, it’s a young crowd with 85 percent of members are under the age of 35 and 55 percent are under the age of 25.

At The Pool is based in Los Angeles. It is the silver to Facebook’s gold.

Updated 5:11 PM Aug. 30 with a note from Microsoft

Facebook users are adding a stunning 300 million new photos each and every day. So Bing just added a new way to search and browse your friends’ photos without all the clutter of status updates and friend requests.

The new feature is part of Bing’s ongoing evolution to make search more visual. Friends’ photos already show up in search sidebars when relevant, but now interested users can go straight to bing.com/friendsphotos to browse and search all their Facebook friends’ images.

I tried it, and it’s actually better at browsing than searching, but that could be your friends’ fault, not Bing’s. Many Facebook users upload images with little or no metadata, making them difficult to index for search. (Perhaps Bing could license Google’s newest technology for knowing what pictures and video contain.)

Connect Bing to Facebook, and your friends’ photos show up in a Pinterest-like stream:

Search did not work well for me; repeated attempts with “dog,” “baby,” and “beach,” among others, brought up no results. So either I am the biggest loser in the world with no friends, or my friends don’t tag their photos very well:

Update: I received the following note from a Microsoft representative about searching:

I noticed that you had some trouble getting the friends photos search to work. Since this is a new feature, it will take Bing some time to crawl all the photos; but the more you use it, the more photos will surface. Also, you might try searching for your Facebook album titles to see more pictures; and if you’ve recently changed any of your settings, you may also try logging out of Facebook on Bing and logging back in.

What I did find very useful was friend search, which allowed me to view each friend’s photos in a stream, and the default stream of all my friends’ pictures, which is a great way to get visually updated in a hurry on where your friends are and what they’re doing.

But image search? Not a winner yet.

Image credits: Bing

Bloomberg said this morning that documentation recently provided to Apple developers includes screenshots of Yelp check-ins within the new Apple Maps application, which will replace Google Maps as the default mapping solution within iOS sometime this fall.

Yelp has been a content partner for Apple’s Siri personal assistant since Siri’s launch, and Yelp’s positioning within the Siri service was solidified at the recent World Wide Developer’s Conference, where Apple revealed that Yelp star ratings and would appear within Siri results and that users could tap to go directly to a local business landing page on Yelp.

But this is a new level of integration.

Facebook’s new “Find Friends Nearby” feature uses your phone’s location-awareness functionality to broadcast your location to anyone nearby. Yelp checkins help users find friends as well but also enable discounts and preferential treatment at participating businesses. It’s not yet clear, however, if the new Apple Maps feature will allow iPhone owners to participate in those or if users will need a separate Yelp account in order to check in.

Checkins are also a major feature of Foursquare, although that location-based social network has recently been redesigned to simplify and de-emphasize the actual act of checking in.

Apple has not yet confirmed the news. VentureBeat has asked Apple PR to comment, and when we hear more, we’ll update this story.

Image credit: ShutterStock

Star Your Close Friends is simple and intuitive to use. A new area simply appears at the top of your news feed with the title “Don’t Miss the Good Stuff.” When you move your mouse over your friends’ images, you see a grey star. Click and the star turns yellow: you’ve starred that friend.

Now more of his or her status updates will appear on your Facebook wall.

A Facebook representative contacted by VentureBeat told us that Facebook is trying to help users customize what status message they receive: “Yesterday we started rolling this out for some users to help them easily group their close friends into a list.”

Facebook seems to be fairly intelligent about who it presents to users as potential “star-ees.” When I saw the feature last night, the friends I most often interact with were shown by default. But people can also search for specific friends to add ones that are not seen.

One important thing to note: Your friends will not know whether or not they’ve been starred, eliminating a potentially sticky privacy issue.

This new feature potentially solves two problems for Facebook: unseen status updates for close friends, and easy friend categorization.

A starred friend.

The first has been a problem for some time. As we know from Facebook itself, only 10 percent of your friends may actually see any given status update from you. The challenge is so severe that Facebook was actually testing a feature to allow you to pay to ensure that your status updates were noticed. But now, Star Your Close Friends will allow people to make sure they see important news from the friends they care about most, solving a large part of that problem, if only from the perspective of the person getting the status updates.

The second problem, friend categorization, is more of a competitive pressure from Google+. Circles, the way Google+ helps you categorize your connections, has widely been admired and praised. Facebook tried to address this with Smart Lists, but not with any great degree of success. Star Your Close Friends, however, is extremely simple and quick — in fact, it’s easier and more intuitive than Circles. Instead of multiple circles, overlapping circles, and circles with different levels of status update visibility, Star Your Friends is simple and binary: friends are either in or they’re out. And a single click is all it takes.

After starring friends, Facebook adds a new list in the Friends: Close Friends. A helpful pop-up tells you that “Now you can jump straight to your close friends’ photos and news. You’ll also get notifications whenever they post.”

Interestingly, Facebook seems to be trying to limit how many friends you star. Not by imposing a hard limit, but by visually indicating in the interface that the user is almost filling up a limited space. Here’s what you see as you add friends before hitting the recommended maximum, and what you see after continuing to add friends. The +2 seems to indicate that you are possibly adding more than Facebook recommends.

Star Your Close Friends is a very interesting new development. Would you welcome this change? I know I would.

Photo credit: UggBoy/Flickr

The search giant’s social network — which delivers data in bite-sized chunks thanks to the use of Circles — is built for early adopters somewhere between 21 and 27. Facebook has become a glorified phone book, while Google+ is the place where we go to communicate with friends. I can’t speak for everyone else, but more than half of my Facebook friends have already completed said migration.

On Facebook, you typically run into the problem of over-sharing. There’s no filter on the regular News Feed, so you have to basically parse through every single story until you find something of interest. The Top News feed is a little better about this because it picks up on heavily-commented stories or stories from profiles you actively follow, but there’s still an enormous amount of content. We’ve become really efficient at finding relevant information through both systems, but it’s still a broken way of doing so.

On Google+, curation happens at both ends — the person posting and the person reading — through the site’s Circles feature. Instead of having a single friends list, Google+ makes its users divvy contacts up into smaller lists of friends. You can then pick which circles to specifically view content, or view all circles at once.

For example, there are two ways I can get information about Baseball: I have a “Baseball” circle that I populate with friends that regularly talk about Baseball. When I click on the “Baseball” circle, it’s immediately populated with those friends and I can quickly sort through it to find relevant information with less noise.

On the other end, I know that many of my friends have their own “Baseball” circles, to which they post content related to Baseball. I know that when I select my “friends” stream, I’m going to receive content from those posting in “Baseball” circles (or, in the case of one friend, the “infamous Beisbol” circle.)

Some of the circles can get incredibly specific. I’m part of a coveted “beard” circle, an elite group of individuals with beards. The owner of said circle issues a Beard of the Day post.

My own circles include specific circles for PR officials that are trying to stalk me to better refine their pitches. There’s a circle for the competition — which includes the likes of MG Siegler of TechCrunch and Ben Parr of Mashable. I have my own circle for friends with beards — only epic ones, which should be obvious by the name: “AAAAAAWWWWW BEEEEAAAARD.” I have a circle for my family, too, though for some reason it felt oddly appropriate to add former VentureBeat executive editor Owen Thomas to that circle.

VentureBeat’s Jolie O’Dell, who joined the team yesterday, remains unconvinced by Google+. Her argument is that it doesn’t appeal to the middle ground, and circles are too complex. It’s true that Facebook has simplicity going for it, but that simplicity also carries a cost with savvy individuals who know how to use a network as well as they know how to ride a bike.

That group of Google+ loving misfits are early adopters who generate more content in an hour than most people do in several days. It’s also a group that has to deal with over-sharing on sites like Twitter and Facebook, both of which tried to tackle the issue. Facebook tried pushing Lists and Groups, but those didn’t work easily enough for most people. Twitter expects you to curate the people you follow and also lets you add people to “lists,” but Twitter’s public nature means isn’t a very good tool for following what’s going on with your close circle of friends.

Google+ falls somewhere in between Facebook and Twitter, and it works like a charm. There are also a number of other benefits that come along with having billions of dollars of revenue thrown behind it. For instance, Google+ isn’t populated by advertising — yet — and there aren’t that many spam accounts. As a whole, the experience feels more refined and there is less noise from individuals I’m less interested in following.

Google+ already has more than 10 million user and 20 million visitors, which it picked up in 16 days. Twitter and Facebook both took around two years before they hit 20 million users. Those sites didn’t have billions of dollars in revenue and some of the best engineering talent around when they launched, but that shouldn’t take away from Google’s accomplishment with Google+.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Popular check-in application Foursquare is facing a problem that has long bedeviled social networks — spurious friend requests. And it’s dealing with violators by putting a cap on them.

Users now have a limit on the total number of friends they can have as well as the number of friend requests they can send, a change first noticed by AboutFoursquare.com.

For the average user, this may not be an issue: Most users don’t want thousands of people knowing where they are at any given time. So the policy is likely targeted at businesses looking to take advantage of creating a profile on Foursquare. Like Twitter, the microblogging network for posting short status updates, Foursquare allows businesses to create profiles in the same way that people do. That liberal policy is unlike Facebook, the dominant social network, which only allows real human beings to create profiles and requires businesses to use a different format called Pages.

Some companies have been randomly sending friend requests to thousands of Foursquare users, like Bastardjeans.com, which currently has 61, 923 friends. Why would they do this? Well, the benefit comes when one of those users checks in to a venue where Bastardjeans.com has left a tip. Since friends’ tips are displayed first, Bastardjeans.com gets more visibility.

Other advantages include being able to know where these users are from their check-ins, as well as being able to send them messages, since many Foursquare users share contact information with friends. All of these could be advantageous to a business looking to promote itself — though it’s probably not how Foursquare or most of its users envisioned the service operating.

Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley told VentureBeat that the startup is constantly working to adjust the balance between letting businesses engage with users, while at the same time trying to keep a positive user experience. Asked what the limits on friends and friend requests would be, Crowley said, “I think they’re still in flux right now.”

As of right now, Foursquare’s major competitors, Gowalla and Scvngr, do not have plans to restrict total friends or friend requests.

While Foursquare is still young and most users have few friends compared to the bigger social networks, one wonders if the restrictions may push some avid users to eventually go with another location-based applications with fewer restrictions. That happened with Friendster, an early social network which cracked down on fake profiles and lost ground to the less-restrictive MySpace.

Foursquare, based in New York City and founded in 2009, has raised more than $21 million in funding. It currently has more than 40 employees in its hometown and a new engineering office it’s opening in San Francisco.

Loopt users will now be able to seamlessly connect their Facebook profiles with the Loopt application. Through the connection, users will be able to not only see where their Facebook friends are on a map (see above), but also have dual check-in capabilities. For example, a user checking in to McDonald’s through the Loopt app will also have their location shown on Facebook Places. The Loopt app will also allow users to see their Facebook friends in their Loopt friend list.

The company is one of the early leaders in the location-based space, but has seen a lot of competition from other companies. Gowalla, a check-in service, is already integrated with Facebook Places and continues to work on building out its partnerships, including recent scavenger hunt with NASA. While Foursquare’s chief executive and founder Dennis Crowley may still be deciding on Facebook Places and how it may work with the service.

However don’t count Loopt out just yet, the company continues to make waves with a recent major hire of mobile industry veteran and former senior vice president of mobile at Yahoo Steve Boom as its first president. In addition, Loopt recently launched Loopt Star, including its availability for Android users, which allows users to check-in to places and get rewards.

The Mountain View, Calif. based company, founded in 2006, has raised a total of $17 million from Sequoia Capital and New Enterprise Associates. It was incubated by Y Combinator.

One company, Placepop, is looking to give Facebook users insight into their own check-ins as well as their friends. The new Facebook application also shows trending check-ins, similar to topics on Twitter. As of right now, the top three trending check-in locations are all in California, including AT&T Park (where the San Francisco Giants play), Facebook HQ and Hollywood Bowl (a place for concerts).

Another, Scvngr, a mobile game company that gives users challenges after they check-in, yesterday announced its own integration with Facebook Places in an attempt to increase its users, according to All Facebook. Ideally, more users may mean more interest from  the businesses and organizations that pay to have their customers and employees play the game.

Finally, Booyah, a location-based gaming company, recently announced the launch of InCrowd, an iPhone application that lets users interact with friends and share posts in real-time in real-world locations.

There is no doubt that these companies are looking to cash in on a large Facebook user base, but I’m skeptical on how many of those Facebook users have actually used Places, or are even interested. A recent article in the New York Times highlights a Forrester Research report which notes that just 4 percent of all Americans have even tried a location-based service and only 1 percent use them on a weekly basis.

Will Facebook be the catalyst to get more consumers participating more in location-based services and check-ins? Maybe, though there’s evidence that Facebook users may have some fear and confusion over privacy, an ongoing issue for the social networking site.

(Disclosure: I’m working on a location-based startup idea of my own.)